In my Big Journalism piece, “How an Enviro-Advocacy Group Propped Up Global Warming in the MSM – A Nov 2 Election Connection” I described how the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase is a viral accusation against global warming skeptic scientists. The beauty of the phrase is its simplicity and powerful influence, even when people misstate organizations associated with it. Al Gore disciples say global warming is a proven fact, all scientists know this, but a minority received massive energy industry funding to say the science isn’t settled.

The phrase is prominently seen in Gore’s movie, full screen in red letters for six seconds, followed by a slide of a very old cigarette advertisement as a setup for the next slide where Gore quoted a supposedly leaked tobacco industry memo, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.”

Gore didn’t identify the origins of the “reposition” phrase in the movie, so errors occurring when it was repeated it are understandable. I’ve seen offbeat errors where blog writers say the phrase came from “a surgeon general”, that it was “a leaked government memo”, that it is part of  “a movement by politicians to reposition global warming”, or that it was “memos circulated by some of today’s oil companies.”

But Gore himself said this, in a 2008 YouTube video, starting at the 29:10 point,

Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’

This is inexplicably contradictory to the book version of his movie – although it takes one additional step to understand why - when he says in reference to:

…a relatively small but extremely well-funded cadre of special interests, including Exxon Mobil and a few other oil, coal, and utilities companies…. One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.

As I pointed out in my July American Thinker article, Gelbspan is neither the discoverer nor a Pulitzer winner, and a careful examination of his 1997 book The Heat is On reveals he specifically said the “reposition” phrase came exclusively from the 1991 Information Council on the Environment (ICE) public relations campaign, created by group of utility and coal industries.

Utility and coal, not oil – or oil industry associations.

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Tax hikes on the oil and gas industry being pursued by the Obama administration will have a crippling effect on the U.S. economy, says a new report by professor Joseph Mason of Louisiana State University.

In the study published earlier this week, the economics professor found that President Obama’s proposal in the 2011 budget to repeal tax credits for oil and gas companies will trigger “extensive economic losses” over the next 10 years.

If enacted, the plan could reduce economic output by nearly $341 billion, slash more than 154,000 jobs in 2011 and cut wages by $68 billion. Each year the Obama tax policies are in place, the study says, they would also hemorrhage an additional 115,000 jobs, many of them in the unrelated fields of healthcare and manufacturing.

Obama’s budget proposal calls for rollbacks on two types of tax credits, one under Section 199 of the U.S. tax code, which grants companies the ability to write off 6 percent of their revenue from oil and gas production from their tax liability. This proposal was struck down in a 56-42 cloture vote in the Senate Tuesday.

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Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a front page article that claimed, “an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.”  The thesis of the article was that oil companies are the benefactors of enormous subsides, primarily through complicated maneuvering of offshore assets, “tax breaks,” and “loopholes.”

Unfortunately, the copy of the American tax code that The Times used to conduct their careful analysis appears to have been heavily edited by a cadre of left leaning groups, including ACORN President Maude Hurd, Citizens for Tax Justice, Center for American Progress and the Clean Energy Works campaign.

The smoking gun comes in the form of a leaked memo from CEW communications advisor and former Democratic congressional staffer David Di Martino just days after The New York Times ran it’s wildly misguided assessment of U.S. tax policy.

In the memo, Di Martino outlines a strategy to change America’s perception of increased taxes on energy producers as a tax on consumers by arguing “the American people already have a national energy tax — The Big Oil Welfare Tax — in the form of billions of dollars in subsidies to the wildly profitable big oil companies.”  The same day that Di Martino released his memo, Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) released their own defective and dishonest hit piece, titled “What Oil and Gas Companies Extract from the American Public.”   The tax breaks referred to by Di Martino and the CTJ memo, in reality, are the same credits that every American company receives for taxes paid overseas to foreign governments on income earned abroad.

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